Customer Reviews

Pro Sync Framework

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The book does a pretty good job of explaining the process of creating your own sync providers. It's not thorough in it's explanation by any means, but sufficient. The authors also have a tendency to repeat themselves. There are a few sections that seem to just reiterate material that was previously covered.

This book is somehow useful for people who like to learn about a topic in a sequential fashion. However, much better level of content is available for free online on the MSDN portal.

The book has a lot of verbatim quotes from the official MSF 1.0 documentation and seems to be a very simple regurgitation of it. The authors don't seem to have a lot of real life experience with building complex application with MSF. Besides, the code snippets in the book are pretty poorly formatted.

The book is full of generic assertions and copy/paste paragraphs.

I'm not often motivated to write a review, but in this case I feel obligated to spare others time, money and frustration. The book was chock full of typos, and not just incidental, but sometimes confusing important issues. The very first sample project does not work properly, even though I loaded the source from Apress's web site, and ran it against a recently downloaded Microsoft Sync Framework. But the worst part was the organization, which leads you in great detail (sufficient? How can you know?) in building custom interfaces, all the while telling you that using the interfaces provided by Microsoft are to be preferred, but not describing them or telling you how to use them.
I went through the first few chapters in detail, hoping for the best. But then I skimmed through the rest, searching for something that might be of value to me. To no avail.
I purchased this book because it seemed to be the only one on the topic, but the Microsoft web sites describing Sync Framework were much better written, presented and illustrated, and overall much, much more helpful.

I'm involved in a project that will heavily rely upon the sync framework to exchange information between several different devices and stores. Hoping that this would provide more in-depth knowledge and examples than the Microsoft Sync Framework 2.1 SDK does I recently purchased this book. What an awful disappointment. This book does nothing more than organize the same content you can find in the Microsoft SDK. As the authors begin to delve deeper into the topic, they fall back and revert to the standard Microsoft samples. Well, at least I didn't pay cover price for this one. So, unless you are looking for a quick start to standard Sync scenarios, this is not the book for you. If you are looking for a quick start to standardized Sync scenarios, stick to the Microsoft SDK, and save yourself the shipping cost of this.

Simply reading the concepts behind the Sync Framework (whether in this book or on msdn) makes the technology seem very complicated and tedious to incorporate into an application. The reason for this (I believe) is that the Sync Framework has many moving parts. Working through the code examples provided by the authors quickly shows that while there are many moving parts, each part is actually quite simple and it's rather intuitive how everything comes together to form a very powerful synchronization platform.

This book does a wonderful job of "teaching by example". Work through the examples and adapt them to handle synchronization between two simple custom datastores and in a day or two you'll finally understand how this this framework works and how truly flexible and powerful it is.

I'm very thankful for this book!

I am very glad to have bought this book. It is fantastic! The book is not a theoretical read; it shares the real world tasks and useful examples that reader can actually use.